Wind and hot air
You print Niall Stuart’s letter under the heading “All evidence suggests planning system gets it right on planning applications” (3 August). No surprise that it comes from a chief executive of Scottish Renewables. To anyone with reasonable eyesight and a modicum of wit, the facts point in the opposite direction.
Stand anywhere near East Kilbride or Kilmarnock and the horizon is a continuum of wind turbines. Drive up the M74 and it is the same, as it is over much of Scotland. The claim that wind energy provides the bulk of our renewable energy hides the fact that this amounts to only about 6 per cent of our total requirements.
Only about half of the “thousands of jobs supported by the industry” are filled by Scots. Irish and Welsh companies have been very active in the construction of wind farms and they use their own employees from these counious tries, as well as employing eastern Europeans.
I would strongly recommend Mr Stuart climbs a hill somewhere in scotland, opens his eyes and acquaints himself with the visual devastation inflicted upon us by wind turbines.
RICHARD LYON Portcheek Terrace Kirkmichael, South Ayrshire Instead of asking how we can continue to sustain western lifestyles by extracting every last drop of fossil fuel from the earth or the seabed, would it not be more pertinent to consider the needs of future generations, even if we choose to ignore the irreversible damage we have already inflicted on the planet?
Wednesday marked Earth Overshoot Day, the point in any year after which humans are consuming more than the planet can regenerate in that year. It gets earlier every year, and western civilisation is the main driver of this phenomenon. We have been profligate with our energy consumption in order to sustain lifestyles which are entirely dependent on consumerism.
In the meantime, there are millions of people across the planet whose basic needs for food, shelter, health and education are unmet. They are not responsible for the proliferation of discarded, and often completely inessential, consumer goods which end up in municipal dumps, rivers or, at best, in recycling centres.
We should be giving more thought to this discrepancy between “winners and losers” rather than looking for new energy sources to sustain life as we know it in the relatively prosperous west.
If western lifestyles continue to inflict an unsustainable burden on the planet, history will judge our generation harshly. CAROLYN TAYLOR
Wellbank Broughty Ferry, Dundee